| Notes |
- From an article by John L. Brooke
In a noted review of occult practice in 18th century New England, the Rev Erza Stiles of Newport RI wrote in June 1773 of a "Mr Stafford of Tiverton lately dead who was wont to tell where lost things might be found and what day, hour and minute was forturnate for vessels to sail?. Stiles probably had seen the notice in the Newport Mercury of 31 May 1773, listing the death at Tiverton of "Joseph Stafford, Esq, a very celebrated astrologer."
Joseph Stafford came from a family well outside of the orbit of Puritan orthodoxy. His grandfather, Sylvester Stover, settled at Cape Neddick in York, Maine in 1649, where he joined a fishing partnership and served as ferryman. Stover's household on the Cape Neddick River was located in an outlying area in a town given to some religious diversity. The early church in York was nominally Anglican in doctrine, but when in 1689, the settled minister tried to disrupt a meeting of "traveling Quakers" a number of the town's leading men were willing to testify against his conduct before a grand jury that summer. Stover died around 1689, having sailed for England in 1688, and in the following years his family was driver from York by Indian attacks. Some children to other Maine towns, his wife to Scituate, MA and his son Josiah, changing his name to Stafford, to Tiverton, then part of Bristol Co. MA, a town just east of Newport, RI. Predominatly Baptist and Quaker, the people of Tiverton and adjacent Dartmouth struggle for decades against the efford of the MA authorities to impose church taxes. Finally Tiverton was annexed to RI in 1746. Stafford were amoung the Quaker families in Tiverton, as were the Durfees and Chases.
Born around 1700, Josiah's son, Joseph Stafford, was both a man of local standing and practitioner of the occult. Signing his will in 1770 as "esquire", he was apparently a justice of the peace as well as a physician of local reputation. He was also a writer of almanacs and teller of fortunes. It is impossible to say exactly which sect he adhered to, but in 1778 his brothers Abraham and David Stafford were attending the Sixth Principle Baptist Church located on the Tiverton-Dartmouth line. The minister, Peleg Burroughs, describe by one historian as "tinctured" with Quakerism, was married to a devout Seventh Day Baptist, Keziah Burdick, a granddaughter of one of the founders of the Westerly branch of the Newport Sabbatarian church.
His June 1700 will split his farmstead between his older sons, John and Samuel. But to his younger son Lilly, presumably name for William Lilly - the astrologer, he left money, notes, book debts, as well as "all my library of books with all my apothecary stuff and phials with the book case tha the books are in .... and a small chest in the Chamber with apothecary stuff in it..." These items surviving a wagon trip to western New York around 1820, have remained together in family hands for two centuries, passing down to Marie Stafford Stokoe and her son William Stokoe.
Joseph apparently had hopes of finding buried treasure. A slip of paper notes money paid to Abraham Stafford in 1768 for "digging", perhaps in the search for Mr. Wing's treasure in Sandwich, a Quaker town 45 miles to the east on Cape Cod.
Joseph and Abraham Stafford probably found nothing at Sandwich, but their brother David's children were still looking for treasure a half-century later. Stafford, Durfees, and Chases from Tiverton all settled in the Quaker settlement of Farmington, in Ontario Co. NY, early in the 19th century. Here Staffords and Chases searched for treasure in the hills, looking for magical direction in bits of stream-polished stone. Joshua Stafford had "a peepstone with looked like white marble"; Sally Chase's stone was green glass. And here they knew another family inclined to the magical, the family of Joseph and Luck Mack Smith, arriving from Vermont in 1816, for whom the hunt for earthly treasure was only a prologue to the miricles and visions which announced the emergence of the Mormon church.
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Abt 1701 - 1773 (~ 72 years)
